Ottawa is more diverse than ever — but not at city hall

Lilly Obina ran in the municipal elections in 2010 and 2014 in the Gloucester-Southgate ward before losing to Dianne Deans both times. She says the lack of diversity on city council is a concern. Julie Oliver / Postmedia

As his hometown in Lebanon came under the grip of civil war, George Darouze decided to pack his bags and move to Ottawa in 1990, wanting to give his family a chance for a fresh start.

Darouze began juggling three jobs, working 18 hours a day, seven days a week as a bus boy and as a baker, making muffins and cookies at Billings Bridge. The money he earned in his first year was enough to sponsor his family. Then, for the next 17 years, Darouze worked in the telecommunications industry, negotiating contracts on behalf of his corporate accounts and building rapport with his client base.

While Ottawa is more ethnically diverse than it’s ever been, the makeup of the capital’s politicians remains largely white.

Despite the fact that one in every four people in Ottawa is a visible minority, according to the latest Statistics Canada data, the city has only elected a handful of non-white councillors — and never a black or East or Southeast Asian councillor — post-amalgamation.

“I think it’s a problem,” said Lilly Obina, a black candidate from Uganda who ran twice for the Gloucester-Southgate ward in 2010 and 2014, before losing to Diane Deans both times. “Diversity on council is important. Although issues at a macro level are similar, at a micro level there are certain things that probably affect my community more than it affects others.

“Because I’m in the community, I can see and experience it, so it’s easy for me to talk about it on council.”

Of 95 council seats up for grabs in the four Ottawa municipal elections since amalgamation in 2001, visible minority councillors have only occupied them nine times (9.4 per cent). Two councillors — Eli El-Chantiry, who is from Lebanon, and Shad Qadri, who is from Pakistan — have been elected for seven of those nine seats post-2001. The other two seats are filled by rookie councillors Michael Qaqish, whose parents are Jordanian and Palestinian-Iraqi, and George Darouze, from Lebanon.

Altogether, El-Chantiry, Qadri, Qaqish and Darouze — all of whom are currently sitting — make up just 16 per cent of the 24-member council. In Ottawa in 2016, visible minorities — which StatCan defines as “persons, other than Aboriginal peoples, who are non-Caucasian in race or non-white in colour” — numbered 241,250 people of 934,243, or 25.8 per cent of the total population.

Darouze says ethnic representation is not as important as the ability of the councillor to reflect all of the diverse communities in their ward.

“I don’t think it’s really necessary to say, ‘Well, because we live in a diverse community, we have to have one councillor from every race,’” said Darouze. “This is my first term, and we work very, very hard on files and with so many community groups who come and talk to us about their issues.

“Your candidate should be able to represent you based on their ability or capacity. It doesn’t matter about their colour, race, gender, sexual orientation.”

Others characterize the lack of diversity as being much more pressing.

“What’s happening in Ottawa is happening in Toronto, is happening in Montreal, is happening in Calgary,” said Velma Morgan, the chair of Operation Black Vote Canada, a non-profit that aims to encourage black and visible minority communities to participate in politics.

“The municipal level is the level that has the least amount of diversity on council, in general, across Canada,” Morgan said.

“I don’t expect a white man to have the experience of a poor black woman, or what she might need. Having diverse views on council, you have a more fulsome debate on issues and how to implement policy fairly so it doesn’t have an adverse effect on certain communities more than others.”

The reasons for the lack of diversity on council are wide-ranging, and sometimes difficult to pin down, according to current Ottawa councillors, former municipal election candidates and those advocating for more participation from different ethnic communities in politics.

In particular, the dearth of black and Southeast or East Asians — which includes China, Japan, Korea, Thailand and Vietnam — is telling. Those groups together make up 130,950 or 14.4 per cent of Ottawa’s population — yet council has never had a representative from any of those communities post-amalgamation.

Part of the cause for council’s enduring homogeneity, some say, might have to do with the cultural backgrounds of some ethnic communities that occasionally shrink from political engagement, or distrust the institutions around politics altogether.

“Growing up, my parents would say, ‘Stay away from politics and religion,’” said Coun. Qaqish. “I think perhaps some of the ethnic groups, including mine, given some of the situations or political oppression they may have been used to in other countries, turn away from politics.

Coun. Michael Qaqish.Julie Oliver /
Postmedia

“Historically, that’s maybe been the case, but I think things are changing now, and people are seeing more and more ethnic candidates winning races.”

Soo Wong, a Toronto-area MPP who was the first female Chinese-Canadian to be elected to Queen’s Park, said some East Asian communities don’t bother to engage in politics, or even associate such daily services as garbage pickup and OHIP cards with decisions made at the municipal or provincial levels.

“My culture, we don’t get involved. You will have to give them a very good reason just for a simple thing as going to vote. They don’t look at platform comparisons, why voting matters. Most of Chinese family dining tables, it’s not talking about politics — it’s about food, kids’ education, health care.

“Some of them come from countries that have no democracy. … They don’t have freedom to voice their opinions, or they’ll get in trouble with the government. And for the longest time, there was a perception politicians are not clean. It’s furthest from the truth.”

Soo Wong was the first female Chinese-Canadian to be elected to Queen’s Park.Liberal Party of Ontario/QMI Agency

Wong said racism is another factor that might affect would-be politicians from campaigning or entering the field.

“When I talk about racism, let’s call it the elephant in the room,” said Wong. “I heard so many times growing up and even running for public office, ‘Why is a young Chinese girl like you running for public office? Aren’t you people supposed to be very quiet?’ Or they see me sitting on boards and agencies or as an MPP and say, ‘Maybe she’s a token.’”

Hussein Mahmoud, a 31-year-old Lebanese banker who ran for Alta Vista in 2014, said most of the people he interacted with on his campaign were positive and helpful, but a small minority sent him racist messages on Facebook, and scrawled hate graffiti on his signs or broke them.

“I think one of them said I was a terrorist. I got a Facebook message calling me a ‘camel jockey’ and another calling me a ‘sand n—–.’ But 99 per cent of the people were good to me.”

At the end of the day, Mahmoud — who finished third in the race with 1,600 votes compared to Jean Cloutier’s 5,295 — said he wants to believe the reason he wasn’t elected had more to do with his campaign’s organization than the colour of his skin.

“I didn’t win. I can’t make excuses. I had support. I can guarantee you I knocked on more doors than any of the candidates, but it’s just about knocking on the right doors.”

In 2014, the city created an equity and diversity advisory committee that aimed to increase knowledge and understanding about diversity with the help of city department “champions,” but it was scrapped two years later in a mass restructuring.

“That does not in any way suggest we’re no longer committed to diversity and inclusion,” said Marianne Phillips, the city’s human resources director. She said the champions still exist, and the city created “HR strategists” in 2016 who are partly responsible for leading diversity and inclusion strategies in their respective departments.

Phillips said the city also has targets for hiring based on “market availability” numbers, or the pool of people in the workforce from which employers could hire. In 2016, Phillips said the market availability for visible minorities was 18.2 per cent. The city employed only 7.2 per cent visible minorities at that time. It’s aiming to get to at least 10 per cent, and is forming a recruitment strategy to “attract and retain” individuals from diverse communities, Phillips said.

In November, the city hosted a symposium on “navigating the system” after several local black community groups approached Mayor Jim Watson feeling “excluded from the process,” and saying they wanted to be better informed and connected to city services.

Watson said he had already been thinking about the issue of diverse representation after the turnout at a series of mayor’s breakfasts he hosted was mostly white.

“I started reflecting on, ‘How are we doing in terms of our boards, agencies and commissions?’ Just from eyeballing it, it was clear a lot of those organizations didn’t have a quarter of their representation as visible minorities.”

Watson said he doesn’t think it’s a matter of discrimination so much as it is a lack of communication about the opportunities available. As the 2018 municipal election approaches in October, he said questions need to be asked about how the city can better reach diverse communities and excite them about getting involved at the grassroots level, which could, ultimately, lead to more varied voices in the city workforce and on council.

“It would be beneficial to the city as a whole that we have more people from different backgrounds than what’s currently there.

“If you look around council in terms of our professional backgrounds, I think we’re pretty diverse. But it’s not as impressive when it comes to visible minorities on the table.”

Having an assorted set of opinions in city decision-making could make a world of difference for some communities who can’t easily advocate for themselves. Look to our aging demographics for one example, said Amy Zhou, an assistant for Coun. Marianne Wilkinson and co-founder of the Chinese Canadian Collective.

“Ottawa as a whole is gradually getting older and that includes more Asian seniors who can’t speak English as well and are having a few more troubles accessing the services we have,” said Zhou, who suggested future online 311 systems, as an example, might include more visual iconography as opposed to walls of text for people who find English challenging.

Erin Tolley, an assistant political science professor at the University of Toronto, said diverse representation is both symbolically important — ethnic groups who see themselves reflected in their institutions are more likely to be engaged — but also important in order to encourage better policymaking.

“There’s quite a bit of evidence that you will get stronger policy outcomes when you involve a variety of people in making those policies,” said Tolley.

“After 9/11, for example, there was one MP and one senator with Muslim backgrounds, and it was really clear there wasn’t sufficient expertise and knowledge of Islam to address issues around Islamophobia or how to balance civil liberties with concerns about security.”

Darouze said he’s never had any experiences with racism as a politician and was elected in a rural ward, buoyed by community support, despite being a so-called outsider.

“I’m the guy who came from Lebanon, moved to Greely, I had no roots and I got elected,” he said. “El-Chantiry and I represent two massive rural communities and we’re both not born and raised in those communities.”

Coun. El-Chantiry declined an interview when reached for comment. Coun. Qadri also declined to speak, saying he was elected “as a city councillor and not as a visible minority representative.”

The lack of diverse political faces in Ottawa is not only a municipal phenomenon. Provincially, Ottawa-Gatineau only has one out of 11 MPPs — Yasir Naqvi, from Pakistan — who is a visible minority.

Federally, the Ottawa-Gatineau region has two out of 17 seats, or 11.7 per cent, occupied by visible minorities — Chandra Arya in Nepean, and Greg Fergus in Hull-Aylmer.

It takes a lot of time, effort and money to run in a municipal election. It’s even harder if you’re running against an incumbent, who has both name recognition and a known track record. Here are several tips for those trying to get started.

1. Plan ahead — way ahead: Don’t wait until the opening day of election registration in May to throw your name out there. Start at least a year out from voting day, said Velma Morgan of Operation Black Vote — you need time to start assembling a team, canvassing and getting your finances in order. The incumbent has had four years to get their name out there. “I think a lot of the time, we get into the game a little too late,” said Morgan.

2. Get involved: Get out into the community and attend BIA and city council meetings. Introduce yourself to voters, so you’re not just another name on the ballot. If you’re a woman or a visible minority and unsure of where to start, Lilly Obina, who ran twice for council, suggested turning to a resource like the City for All Women Initiative, a group that works with municipal decision-makers for a more inclusive and diverse city.

3. Get the basics down pat: Morgan said people often underestimate exactly how much money, people and resources it takes to run a “basic successful campaign.” You might have to take time off work to canvas, raise enough money to sustain yourself and buy things like signs and airtime, or organize phone banking. Make lots of lists. Don’t be afraid to ask people who have done it before.

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